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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/03/andor/#either
The greatest magic trick of them all is lying. The reason you can't figure out that coin vanish even after the conjurer performs it three times in a row is that they didn't do the same trick three times in a row! They did three different tricks: "Didn't catch it? Here, let me do it again!" is a lie:
There's times when it makes sense to treat two outcomes as the same, even if they were produced by very different means. As a reader, my enjoyment of your novel is the same whether it was dictated, typed on an Underwood Noiseless, keyed into a word processor, or scratched out with a fountain pen:
There's plenty of routes that arrive at the same place, and if the destination is all that matters to you, it's fine to ignore the journey. But often, those end-points have subtle differences that are only revealed when things go wrong. If all you care about is how things work, chances are good that you're in for an unpleasant surprise when things fail.
I recently found myself arguing with an interviewer about whether AI is, or could be, conscious. We weren't arguing about whether it might someday be possible to make an artificial consciousness â as a materialist, I'll happily stipulate to this. I think that everything we call "consciousness" is the result of a physical process occurring within our bodies (and possibly around them?), so I think it's perfectly reasonable to imagine that someday we might create another physical process that produces the same effect.
But that's not what the interviewer wanted to argue about. His point was that teaching more words to the word-guessing program would produce consciousness, an argument I always liken to "breeding horses to run faster and faster until one of them foals a locomotive." In support of this (outlandish) proposition, the interviewer performed a kind of cognitive coin-trick: "I can often predict what my wife is going to say, and so can a chatbot that's been trained on her words. Therefore, we're both doing the same conscious work â and therefore the chatbot will eventually be as conscious as I am."
"Predicting what you will say through an understanding based on a theory of your mind" and "predicting what you are going to say based on a statistical analysis of your utterances" might produce the same outputs, but they are not the same trick. You can tell by what happens when the trick fails.
My wife and I have been together for 23 years now, and there's plenty of times that we can finish each other's sentences â and so can the autocomplete on our phones. The autocomplete manages the trick by exploiting the fact that we often repeat ourselves. But we manage the trick by understanding each other (and by exploiting the fact of repetition).
When my wife says something surprising â because she is angry or delighted, sad or happy â I can make a reliable guess about what caused my prediction to misfire. Our "sentence completion" trick doesn't emerge from a rough, automatically generated mental table of the statistical likelihood that word A will follow word B. We also understand why those combinations appear in each other's speech and writing.
"Understanding" and "statistical extrapolation" can often lead to the same place, but when they don't, "understanding" provides a way forward, while "extrapolation" founders. Both work fine, but only one fails gracefully. The two tricks only appear the same, but they are fundamentally different.
AI's investor story â and the science fiction tales of AI's eventual capabilities that underpin that investor story â makes heavy use of this conjurer's trick, in which two different outcomes are equated to one another because they resemble each other.
This "ignore the journey, focus on the destination" idea is baked very deeply into the way we think about AI. Take the "Turing Test," a complicated and nuanced thought-experiment proposed in 1950. Over the ensuing 75 years, Turing's thought-experiment has been stripped down into a blunt metric: "Can a chatbot trick a human into thinking it is also human?"
"I mistook a chatbot for a human" and "I took a human for a human" arrive at near-identical places, but they are subtly and importantly different. The erroneous assumption that my phone's autocomplete is actually a person who understands me well enough to finish my sentences works fine, but the instant I turn to it for understanding, it will fail very badly. Autocomplete's predictions are always grounded in who you used to be, which means autocomplete knows very little about who you are now, and absolutely nothing about who you will become:
https://reallifemag.com/instant-recall/
The low-rez Turing Test that captured popular discourse is profoundly misleading. It's the unsound foundation of a worldview that renders you incapable of distinguishing your understanding of your spouse from their phone's autocomplete function. It's the self-serving rationale that leads you to declare yourself a proud stochastic parrot:
The AI bubble is (seemingly) full of contradictions, but â like those baffling coin-tricks â these contradictions often resolve themselves very neatly once you realize that the "contradiction" is actually just two things that appear to be one.
For example, some of the billionaires who put up the first several hundred million for AI are solipsists who just don't believe other people are entirely real and therefore find it easy to believe that AI can do their jobs. Other billionaires are cynics who think that bosses can be sold defective worker-replacing chatbots because they're credulous suckers for that pitch, the same way they believe that desperate young men are suckers for Joe Rogan's useless and/or dangerous supplements and peptides:
Billionaire AI true believers and billionaire AI cynics make for a powerful coalition. The roadblocks that might discourage the first group are easily hurdled by the second, and vice-versa. You don't have to believe AI works to believe it can be sold, and you don't have to be motivated by the sales opportunity to believe that AI is about to become god.
Almost every debate I get into about AI turns out to be an unjustified, unacknowledged conflation of two things that seem similar, but have profoundly different underlying characteristics. Take this argument: "Every time we extend rights to the nonhuman world â watersheds, endangered animals, ecosystems â the world gets better. Let's extend rights to AI â whether or not we think it's a 'person' and so reap those benefits."
This, too, is a coin trick. Extending rights to nature reliably makes the world better, but extending rights to constructs makes the world far worse (Exhibit A is corporate personhood) (obviously).
A few moments' thought reveals the difference. If we extend rights to a watershed, that might result in an AI data-center being killed. If we extend rights to AI, that might lead to sacrificing the watershed to cool the data-center:
Then there's AI and labor. The world is full of skilled workers who have found ways to use AI on the job that they insist have improved their work. It's also full of skilled workers who warn us that on-the-job AI is producing tech debt at unimaginable scale, seriously depreciating the quality of the tools we use today, and setting us up for painful reckonings in the future.
This (seeming) contradiction melts away once you realize that these workers only appear to be doing the same thing. The first group of workers, excited about their AI-assisted output, are "centaurs": people assisted by machines; workers who choose the time and manner of their AI adoption. The second group are "reverse centaurs": people recruited to serve as peripherals for machines, who direct their actions and workflow:
Note that this isn't the same thing as saying "A skilled worker who adopts a tool willingly is always right and will produce a better output as a result." Nor is it saying, "The tool is so flawed that workers who claim it works for them must be deluded."
That's another coin trick! The reality â again â is that this is two things: some workers whose AI-assisted work is measurably worse are wrong about AI making their work better (centaurs, but wrong), and; some workers are being forced to use AI and know damned well that it's making their work worse (reverse centaurs).
Finally, there's an economic coin-trick: "AI will destroy jobs." Sure, yes, AI is destroying jobs. But there's a vast difference between "You got fired because an AI can do your job" and "You got fired because your boss was convinced that the AI can do your job, even though it cannot."
This is one of the most consequential coin-tricks, because it's a real convincer for the investors who are funding the AI bubble. The difference is huge: "AI can do your job" means you're well and truly screwed. If an AI can really replace a contract lawyer, then everyone who needs a contract written or evaluated should be on the side of mass technological unemployment for contract lawyers. The point of contract lawyers is to produce contracts, not to pay contract lawyers' law-school debts and mortgages.
BUT! If some BigLaw's credulous partners can be suckered into firing their juniors and replacing them with chatbots who bill you $1,200/hour to produce unenforceable, error-riddled contracts, then everyone who needs a contract is on the same side as the contract lawyers â united in opposition to their bosses:
Every time we fail to draw this distinction, we help an AI boss raise another billion dollars. Every time we insist on this distinction, we hasten the day that the AI bubble pops, thus sparing a few more everyday savers and innocent bystanders from being wiped out in the crash we can all see on the horizon:
As "Cathy" so aptly put it: "The thing that is a good tool for the skilled people is being sold as a thing to reduce the number of skilled people hired":
The former is a normal technology. The latter is the root of a catastrophic folly that is destroying our environment, destroying workers' lives, destroying the quality of the goods and services we rely on, and which will shortly destroy our economy.
@mostlysignssomeportents you believe that machine consciousness is a theoretical possibility; what would you need to see before considering that you might be looking at it?
its called Freeway Park and while it is one of the most interesting single examples of Brutalism in the united states and im proud of it, it is so poorly designed in terms of public safety that it has been renovated twice(?) but continues to be geographically troubling, as its design has facilitated a lot of murders over the years. it was the subject of a funny but gruesome article in the STranger in 2002 called Topography of Terror. the city doesnt keep official tally of how many murders or assaults have happened IN the park but two men in their 30s were stabbed nonfatally during a robbery there earlier this year, for example.
Please save and share this info where possible. This report has since been removed by Amnesty International due to legal threats of libel from JK Rowling. This information is no longer easily accessible.
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Title: The Angel of the Birds
Artist: FrantiĹĄek DvoĹĂĄk (Czech, 1862-1927)
Date: 1910
Genre: religious art
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 203 cm (79.9 in) high x 107 cm (42.1 in) wide
Location: private collection
FrantiĹĄek DvoĹĂĄk, born FrantiĹĄek Bruner, trained in Prague, Vienna, and Munich. He enjoyed success with exhibitions in continental Europe, the UK, and the US, but received little appreciation in his home country until late in his life. At the time he painted The Angel of the Birds, DvoĹĂĄk was strongly influenced by spiritualism, which he had been exposed to during his time in the US.
you have fallen for AI before. even if you donât believe you could ever fall for AI, you very more than likely have at this point. you have scrolled past an AI generated ad not realizing it was AI. youâve seen a drawing online and thought âoh that looks cool,â not realizing it was not created a person. iâm not saying this to scare you, but i am saying it as a reminder that you are not immune to how realistic AI is becoming
the thing that you said would never have soul or imagination like human artists is now indistinguishable from human artists, but you still hate its outputs because
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They need to invent more fake celebrities like Hatsune Miku and Gorillaz and the Muppets because it's genuinely the most sustainable way to maintain a parasocial relationship with the entertainer class.
Kermit the Frog can never get canceled because Kermit the Frog has no agency or personhood beyond what he is imbued with by the collective labor of puppeteers, voice actors, singers, and writers. He is, along with these other examples, effectively a celebrity by gestalt. He has transcended the inherit instability of the celebrity class through diffusion of responsibility for his personhood. He is a god.
Kids, you have not lived until you have seen Big Bird in person. He wasn't even animate at the time -- there is just one of the Big Bird suits on display at the Museum of Puppetry Arts in Atlanta.
All I can say is, they have him behind glass for a reason. I imagine they have to clean it frequently as all of the kids and some of the adults immediately hurl themselves towards him and leave prints on the glass. He is so Big, and Feathery, and Yellow. He is many things that start with capital letters, and also an embodiment of pure love. I wanted to fling myself into his Feathery Yellow Embrace. I teared up. He is so beautiful. You have to go visit him.
my partner and I once spent a long road trip trying to figure out if there is any public figure who is universally positively seen by everyone. the only real candidates were David Attenborough and Kermit.
We need to lay more blame for "Kids don't know how computers work" at the feet of the people responsible: Google.
Google set out about a decade ago to push their (relatively unpopular) chromebooks by supplying them below-cost to schools for students, explicitly marketing them as being easy to restrict to certain activities, and in the offing, kids have now grown up in walled gardens, on glorified tablets that are designed to monetize and restrict every movement to maximize profit for one of the biggest companies in the world.
Tech literacy didn't mysteriously vanish, it was fucking murdered for profit.
yup we had chromebooks in secondary (one of the first years to get them) and while in our years management hadn't yet learned how to block off all the unwanted sites and apps, by the time my brother went to secondary school (the same one) several years later, they had.
Now there was very little they could have done to stop me personally from doing non-school things on the chromebook because i was writing fanfic and the first versions of Entwined in Google Docs which they obviously couldn't block for education reasons, but like. Everything was walled off. every single social media. Even f'ing youtube for awhile which was stupid. no way to download apps and programs. very little ability to change stuff in the settings. Forcibly installed spyware that let teachers look at your screen basically at any time (yes it was only used during class but like they could technically do it whenever.) It was literally worse than the average smartphone.
We had the benefit of having grown up with access to a normal computer at home and moderately tech-savvy family members. People who have literally never seen or used anything other than a smartphone, which is basically just as bad? They're not going to understand how computers work. They're going to be afraid of doing anything more complex than clicking clearly labelled buttons in walled-off apps.
A few hours ago, I had to figure out where my fucking sound recordings were saved on my old phone, because Nextcloud uses proper file paths, but nothing else does (at least by default) so I couldn't see where my own dang files were stored.
And now I'm reminded that a horrifyingly large amount of young people don't know what a file path is. They don't understand how files are stored and organised on basically any device ever (and why this is relevant) because they've never seen a proper directory that wasn't obfuscated by several layers of App UI. And that is indeed (partially) Google's fault.
it is partially Google's fault, but kids have been bad with computers for much longer than the last decade. everything that has made computers easier to use has also made them harder to understand, the corporate surveillance stuff slid easily down an existing gradient.
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